The model for our early bankruptcy laws was Deuteronomy, the idea that, under certain circumstances - in Deuteronomy, it is simply the passage of seven years' time - people are released from debt, simply because they are released from debt. No more debt. You start over again. This has been a very powerful model in this country. It's being destroyed now. People talk about how much new employment, new wealth, and so on are continuously generated in this country.

Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me

There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed.

I do assume that a character or a place is inexhaustible and will always reward further attention.